The Filthy Lucre Tour
20th Apr 2006Portmeirion Tat Portmeirion is an interesting place. It's a town that was built almost completely from scratch by a gentleman call Clough William-Ellis and intended to capture the atmosphere of a mediterranean resort. Depending on your point of view, CWE was either a glorious architectural visionary or someone who had more money than sense. Perhaps both. Anyway, he knocked up this village (as far as I can see without much of an idea of where it was going to generate revenue) over a period of fifty years between 1925 and 1975, when he died. The place is run by a charitable foundation, and most of the buildings in it are owned by the hotel (situated at the bottom) and rented out as holiday cottages. It's certainly a curio. If you ask me the whole place could do with a lick of paint, but the gardens surrounding are splendid, and apparently house a legendary collection of rhododendrons. I've not seen any other collection of rhododendrons, but they looked nice to me. The cafeteria was a bit dilapidated-looking, with a menu featuring "vegetarian option" as one of the dishes. Yum! It turns out that "vegetarian option" was a vegetable lasagne, which I ordered shortly before realising it was covered in cream, which I'm not supposed to be eating for the final week of orthodox easter. I, umm, ate it anyway, possibly in the process submitting to eternal damnation. The funniest thing in Portmeirion were the tat shops. All tourist venues are required by law to have a shop selling "authentic insert_name_here fudge", or miniature national flags on little sticks. Portmeirion had several of them, with the best one selling all sorts of random kitchenware. I'd be intrigued to know who exactly visits Portmeirion and comes away with a new bin for the kitchen. After wandering around Portmeirion until we thought we'd justified our £6.50 entrance fee, we wandered off to the Llanberis pass, from where two of the popular approaches to Snowdon (Wales' highest mountain) depart. We were far too late in the day to try and climb Snowdon itself, but we wandered down the Miners' Track for an hour or so until it started getting steeper, at which point we sat down and had a biscuit. Oh, and, umm, I had one with milk chocolate in it by mistake. Sorry Jesus, but being vegan is a lot harder than being vegetarian. I think it would have been much easier in London, which is full of pretentious tossers mucking around with diet fads, but when you're standing at the food counter of a bar in Betws-y-Coed trying to explain that you don't eat meat or any animal products you can see them thinking "you're from London, aren't you".
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